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> not clear to me that there is a plausible and equally viable alternative path from an organic economy to an industrial one that doesn’t initially use coal and

> not clear to me that there is a plausible and equally viable alternative path from an organic economy to an industrial one that doesn’t initially use coal and which does not gain traction by transforming textile production Here, in a nutshell, is an explanation for great power competition. Societal advancement requires step changes in productivity. Leaps in productivity require proximity to means of production. Production requires resources, and resources require access. Access is competitive. Competition breeds conflict, creates winners and losers, and fosters its own forms of advancement and innovation - often at terrible humanitarian short term costs. Nevertheless, being a winner ultimately means your society persists (Great Britain), and being a loser means your society expires (Roman Empire).

tda 4y ago
I think that the term industrial revolution is a bit misleading even, it should be named the fossil fuel revolution. Because cheap and abundant energy is what differentiates the world post industrial revolution from the world before more than anything else
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  The industrial revolution used water power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_power_during_the_Industrial_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_power_during_the_Industr... > Improvements to the steam engine were some of the most important technologies of the Industrial Revolution, although steam did not replace water power in importance in Britain until after the Industrial Revolution
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  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    Precisely this. Coal for powering machinery was just at the science experiment stage in the First Industrial Revolution. Water power was the workhorse. Even for iron and steel making, America (which has an abundance of trees) relied primarily on charcoal well into the mid 1800s.
    - tomxor 4y ago
      > Water power was the workhorse Wasn't the workhorse the workhorse before water power, allowing larger scale farming - which itself is another large step in human history towards increased efficiency and mass production that predates both the industrial revolution and the Roman empire. I believe horses and even people were also used to drive non-agricultural machinery before water and steam. The underlying theme to all these things feels more like "automation" than any specific energy source which are seemingly arbitrary (whatever is at hand, quite literally sometimes).
      - towaway15463 4y ago
        It’s still energy. The difference in power output between a horse and an engine is quite large. You also need cheap energy in order to automate anything. Energy derived from people and horses is expensive.
      - jcranmer 4y ago
        The energy source is actually very important, because it dictates how much energy you have to invest to gain extra energy. Using draft animals has a very low rate of return. During my grandparents' time, the draft animals used to produce the food consumed about a third of the total farm produce--and this is likely to be a more efficient farm than any that existed a thousand or two thousand years ago. Fundamentally, this means you have wildly different costs for energy. Modern electrical energy costs around ten cents per kilowatt-hour. Gasoline fuel costs in the US right now turn out to around eleven cents per kilowatt-hour basis (although obviously an internal combustion engine isn't the same efficiency as a electric engine). By way of comparison, a single workhorse for an entire working day will put out maybe 6 kWh of energy, and the food input requirements for that workhorse are going to cost far more than 60 cents.
  - mannykannot 4y ago
    This is essentially a definitional issue - do you define it narrowly, with multiple sequential revolutions along the path of industrialization, or broadly, with multiple phases? The facts are the same either way. Personally, I prefer the latter view, on account of how the various stages interacted. Water-powered mechanical fabric manufacture greatly expanded the use case for rotary-output steam engines, and both technologies took off synergistically when the latter became available with sufficient efficiency. Mechanized manufacture greatly expanded the use case for mechanized transport...
  - t_mann 4y ago
    > The industrial revolution used water power. No. "Water power is the use of falling or fast-running water to produce electricity or to power machines" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydropower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydropower). Steam engines used coal, ie fossil fuels. By your defintion, even nuclear plants would be "water power".
    - zardo 4y ago
      > No. "Water power is the use of falling or fast-running water to produce electricity or to power machines" Which is what powered most factories throughout the industrial revolution. Not using electricity obviously, machines would be connected by belt to overhead power shafts, which were connected to a water wheel.
LtWorf 4y ago
This seems a very extreme oversemplification that explains nothing.
WJW 4y ago
Hmmm. This argument would be a lot more convincing IMO if the Roman Empire had expired because it lost out to a more industrialized neighbor. Rather, it mostly just collapsed under its own weight.
- anikan_vader 4y ago
  >> just collapsed under its own weight. I mean, it suffered a series of military defeats at the hands of Germanic peoples.
  - 988747 4y ago
    That was just a consequence of internal collapse, which prevented Romans from properly defending themselves, as they successfully did in previous centuries.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Rome wasn't defeated per se; it more or less rotted from within, as the value individuals got out of the society did not match the value put in and the center failed to hold. That was a risk of their economic and societal model independent of the existence / non-existence of an industrial society contemporary to them; there was nothing about Rome's arrangement that guaranteed perpetual stability.
- howmayiannoyyou 4y ago
  > collapsed under its own weight That is a productivity/innovation issue at its core.
dustingetz 4y ago
which book do i read to unpack this
Robotbeat 4y ago
I think coal is exaggerated. The early industrial Revolution, especially in the US, relied much more heavily on water power to drive machinery than coal. In fact, for the First Industrial Revolution, steam power was a footnote. Coal was used for making steel in England, but America primarily used charcoal for iron and steel well into the mid to late 1800s. Coal enabled faster scale up in the Second Industrial Revolution and on into the 1900s, but it was not essential for industrialization.
- jcranmer 4y ago
  The argument here is that coal was specifically necessary to iterate the steam engine to the point that it was viable even on dearer fuel. In the context of railroads, at least in the US, railroads were primarily reliant on wood fuel for steam power during the First Industrial Revolution. But until steam engines became efficient enough to the point that Stephenson could build his Rocket, a steam locomotive powered even by coal wouldn't make for a viable railroad. So without coal, you get no railroads, and without railroads, I doubt you get to the Second Industrial Revolution because inland bulk transport is still too limited.
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    But again, steam power was irrelevant to the economy in the early part of the first industrial Revolution (1760-1800). The first industrial revolution relied at first almost exclusively on water power. Mills and bellows and such were designed to run on water power. Power loom was designed at first for water power. And a lot of the early steam-powered equipment was actually water-powered, with the steam engine serving to pump water to run the machines. Coal wasn’t essential for the first industrial Revolution, except maybe to keep Britain from freezing to death in the winter. The coal-essentialism argument is partially an anachronism as water powered machinery was supplanted by steam (and later electricity) in the Second Industrial Revolution.
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      It seems like the earliest practical steam engine was the Newcomen Engine which wikipedia dates to 1712. It was extremely inefficient so it was pretty much used only at coal mines to pump water out. That water had to go somewhere and formed a canal system in England that helped take the coal to market. I think the problem with trying to find the cause of or the source of a phenomenon like the Industrial Revolution is that it's obviously multi-causal. And the inter-related bootstrap process is fascinating.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
the Roman Empire institution collapsed, their form of society still exists and it's still at the hearth of many western civilizations. roman law, sewer and water systems, flushing toilets, aqueducts, roads, concrete, wellness centers, baths, and much more. they are all inventions of the romans that shaped the western culture, helped the social aspect of what we call "society" develop and brought higher living standards where they were not present, things that today still define the difference between developed countries and developing ones. Paris, Milan, London, they did not know what a sewer system was and what "hygiene and cleanliness" meant, before romans made them a standard for the empire.
bodhiandphysics 4y ago
It would have been a little hard for the romans to industrialize textiles... they didn’t have spinning wheels!
- bregma 4y ago
  A spinning wheel is not required to industrialize textile production since it's just a convenient way to use a spindle. What you'd need is industrial-scale frame jacks to allow one person to run dozens of spindles at the same time plus an external power source to apply. Same goes for milling (grist and saw), smithing, or any of dozens of other artisan crafts that were obviated by the development and application of external power sources.
  - Attrecomet 4y ago

tda 4y ago

I think that the term industrial revolution is a bit misleading even, it should be named the fossil fuel revolution. Because cheap and abundant energy is what differentiates the world post industrial revolution from the world before more than anything else

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
The industrial revolution used water power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_power_during_the_Industrial_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_power_during_the_Industr... > Improvements to the steam engine were some of the most important technologies of the Industrial Revolution, although steam did not replace water power in importance in Britain until after the Industrial Revolution
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  Precisely this. Coal for powering machinery was just at the science experiment stage in the First Industrial Revolution. Water power was the workhorse. Even for iron and steel making, America (which has an abundance of trees) relied primarily on charcoal well into the mid 1800s.
  - tomxor 4y ago
    > Water power was the workhorse Wasn't the workhorse the workhorse before water power, allowing larger scale farming - which itself is another large step in human history towards increased efficiency and mass production that predates both the industrial revolution and the Roman empire. I believe horses and even people were also used to drive non-agricultural machinery before water and steam. The underlying theme to all these things feels more like "automation" than any specific energy source which are seemingly arbitrary (whatever is at hand, quite literally sometimes).
    - towaway15463 4y ago
      It’s still energy. The difference in power output between a horse and an engine is quite large. You also need cheap energy in order to automate anything. Energy derived from people and horses is expensive.
    - jcranmer 4y ago
      The energy source is actually very important, because it dictates how much energy you have to invest to gain extra energy. Using draft animals has a very low rate of return. During my grandparents' time, the draft animals used to produce the food consumed about a third of the total farm produce--and this is likely to be a more efficient farm than any that existed a thousand or two thousand years ago. Fundamentally, this means you have wildly different costs for energy. Modern electrical energy costs around ten cents per kilowatt-hour. Gasoline fuel costs in the US right now turn out to around eleven cents per kilowatt-hour basis (although obviously an internal combustion engine isn't the same efficiency as a electric engine). By way of comparison, a single workhorse for an entire working day will put out maybe 6 kWh of energy, and the food input requirements for that workhorse are going to cost far more than 60 cents.
- mannykannot 4y ago
  This is essentially a definitional issue - do you define it narrowly, with multiple sequential revolutions along the path of industrialization, or broadly, with multiple phases? The facts are the same either way. Personally, I prefer the latter view, on account of how the various stages interacted. Water-powered mechanical fabric manufacture greatly expanded the use case for rotary-output steam engines, and both technologies took off synergistically when the latter became available with sufficient efficiency. Mechanized manufacture greatly expanded the use case for mechanized transport...
- t_mann 4y ago
  > The industrial revolution used water power. No. "Water power is the use of falling or fast-running water to produce electricity or to power machines" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydropower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydropower). Steam engines used coal, ie fossil fuels. By your defintion, even nuclear plants would be "water power".
  - zardo 4y ago
    > No. "Water power is the use of falling or fast-running water to produce electricity or to power machines" Which is what powered most factories throughout the industrial revolution. Not using electricity obviously, machines would be connected by belt to overhead power shafts, which were connected to a water wheel.

LtWorf 4y ago

This seems a very extreme oversemplification that explains nothing.

WJW 4y ago

Hmmm. This argument would be a lot more convincing IMO if the Roman Empire had expired because it lost out to a more industrialized neighbor. Rather, it mostly just collapsed under its own weight.

anikan_vader 4y ago
>> just collapsed under its own weight. I mean, it suffered a series of military defeats at the hands of Germanic peoples.
- 988747 4y ago
  That was just a consequence of internal collapse, which prevented Romans from properly defending themselves, as they successfully did in previous centuries.
shadowgovt 4y ago
Rome wasn't defeated per se; it more or less rotted from within, as the value individuals got out of the society did not match the value put in and the center failed to hold. That was a risk of their economic and societal model independent of the existence / non-existence of an industrial society contemporary to them; there was nothing about Rome's arrangement that guaranteed perpetual stability.
howmayiannoyyou 4y ago
> collapsed under its own weight That is a productivity/innovation issue at its core.

dustingetz 4y ago

which book do i read to unpack this

Robotbeat 4y ago

I think coal is exaggerated. The early industrial Revolution, especially in the US, relied much more heavily on water power to drive machinery than coal. In fact, for the First Industrial Revolution, steam power was a footnote. Coal was used for making steel in England, but America primarily used charcoal for iron and steel well into the mid to late 1800s. Coal enabled faster scale up in the Second Industrial Revolution and on into the 1900s, but it was not essential for industrialization.

jcranmer 4y ago
The argument here is that coal was specifically necessary to iterate the steam engine to the point that it was viable even on dearer fuel. In the context of railroads, at least in the US, railroads were primarily reliant on wood fuel for steam power during the First Industrial Revolution. But until steam engines became efficient enough to the point that Stephenson could build his Rocket, a steam locomotive powered even by coal wouldn't make for a viable railroad. So without coal, you get no railroads, and without railroads, I doubt you get to the Second Industrial Revolution because inland bulk transport is still too limited.
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  But again, steam power was irrelevant to the economy in the early part of the first industrial Revolution (1760-1800). The first industrial revolution relied at first almost exclusively on water power. Mills and bellows and such were designed to run on water power. Power loom was designed at first for water power. And a lot of the early steam-powered equipment was actually water-powered, with the steam engine serving to pump water to run the machines. Coal wasn’t essential for the first industrial Revolution, except maybe to keep Britain from freezing to death in the winter. The coal-essentialism argument is partially an anachronism as water powered machinery was supplanted by steam (and later electricity) in the Second Industrial Revolution.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    It seems like the earliest practical steam engine was the Newcomen Engine which wikipedia dates to 1712. It was extremely inefficient so it was pretty much used only at coal mines to pump water out. That water had to go somewhere and formed a canal system in England that helped take the coal to market. I think the problem with trying to find the cause of or the source of a phenomenon like the Industrial Revolution is that it's obviously multi-causal. And the inter-related bootstrap process is fascinating.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

the Roman Empire institution collapsed, their form of society still exists and it's still at the hearth of many western civilizations. roman law, sewer and water systems, flushing toilets, aqueducts, roads, concrete, wellness centers, baths, and much more. they are all inventions of the romans that shaped the western culture, helped the social aspect of what we call "society" develop and brought higher living standards where they were not present, things that today still define the difference between developed countries and developing ones. Paris, Milan, London, they did not know what a sewer system was and what "hygiene and cleanliness" meant, before romans made them a standard for the empire.

bodhiandphysics 4y ago

It would have been a little hard for the romans to industrialize textiles... they didn’t have spinning wheels!

bregma 4y ago
A spinning wheel is not required to industrialize textile production since it's just a convenient way to use a spindle. What you'd need is industrial-scale frame jacks to allow one person to run dozens of spindles at the same time plus an external power source to apply. Same goes for milling (grist and saw), smithing, or any of dozens of other artisan crafts that were obviated by the development and application of external power sources.
- Attrecomet 4y ago